BY L.P. LUPO

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Suppose I sent one billion high school seniors to the 100 largest libraries in the world to tabulate the 100 most frequently appearing nouns and proper names in each of the books and logged a record of the page numbers on which they appear.

Suppose I then asked the seniors to create an index of all the nouns and proper names by the books and the page numbers.

Suppose that each index entry featured three sample sentences or maybe just “snippets” in which the word is used in context. And let’s say this information — the word, the title, the page numbers and snippets — was all arranged on a massive card catalogue the size of the Pentagon.

Would the authors and publishers mind? Would any author or publisher argue that this unwieldy card catalogue deprived them of what is rightfully theirs? Would the card catalogue infringe on anyone’s copyrights? Most likely not. Even if a few did, would anyone truly believe that the process of creating this card catalogue with the three sentences for each entry amounted to anything but a fair use of the books?

Should a project of this sort be permitted without compensation to the publishers and authors?

They say no and have sued Google, presumably for their piece of the pie.

Now, admittedly, Google is not using one billion seniors to hand collate the information and is not parking the information on paper in the Pentagon or even in a Pentagon-sized building to avoid the specter of Big Brother.

Instead, Google is digitally scanning the books and leaving the card catalogue on the freely accessible Web.

The real question is not copyright infringement or fair use. The real question is: Does Google have the right to do efficiently and electronically what nobody would contest its right to do manually and on paper?

It is not yet clear where the political fault lines will settle in this debate. But two reactions of the opponents of the Google Books Project are unsettling.

Opponents trump all the arguments supporting the project with the fact that Google is a business and intends to make a return on its investment. The horror.

Yes, Google will earn advertising revenues from visits to its Book Search beta Web site. But what if I made money from my Pentagon project by putting up airline-paid travel posters in my catalogue rooms or interspersed fliers in the catalogue advertising snack foods that are great to eat when reading books?

Does my advertising program override the project’s value? If I have money left over, as in “profits,” should that change anything?

Opponents also object to Google’s retention of the full-text digitized copies of all the books included in its database, even if the company is just giving access to sentences or “snippets.”

This sounds like a paranoid-induced argument about the accumulation of knowledge in one place. It is not as if this knowledge will be removed from the libraries around the world.

If Google engages in mission creep and begins to abuse its copyrighted electronic data base beyond its currently advertised use, then that could be actionable. But the slippery slope argument is no reason to prohibit the Google Books project.

The two principal points of opposition do have a Blue State cast to them in the following: attempting to discredit a worthwhile enterprise merely because private profits are involved; creating the false specter of Big Brother under the control of private enterprise; and the instinctive Luddite tendencies of the increasingly inaptly named “progressives,” who always seem to come down on the side of inefficiency.

So let Google do its scanning. It is not violating existing law, and there is no need to enact an anti-Google Book law, as has been suggested. The Republic will survive, indeed improve. And the publishers will sell more books, old and new, because of it.

Maybe Google Books even will result in hits on Red State books, confounding the Left, by showing conservatives write, too.